A reader writes:
Your last post on her book is the single best review of it I have yet seen. But when you wrote:
"because I just want to know. I want to know what really lies under that facade."
I couldn't help but think that it's a fruitless effort. There's nothing under the facade. She believes her own myths. She is ignorant and foolish enough to accept modern conservative slogans as true and believe that they can guide her life, and should guide everyone's. I grew up in the Assemblies of God, and the only thing that surprises me is that you insist on trying to hold her to some fact based world of objective reality.
That just isn't the world as she experiences it. I think she genuinely is the thing that you call a facade. She's the real facade, if you will. To someone who lives in the Pentacostal world of magical, spiritual reality, the contradictions don't matter. God is the answer to contradictions.The slogans don't need "meaning." She believes them because she feels their truth. Her faith filters her reality and because she's been born again, she fears no consequences for God is with her.
All of which makes her the natural leader of the fundamentalist religious movement currently known as the Republican party. That she and they have no grip on objective reality makes them ideal for government, if you just loved the last eight years in which deficits didn't matter, there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Iraq war would cost $50 billion, Afghanistan was a success, Republicans balanced the budget, and waterboarding someone 183 times wasn't torture.
You betcha.